Cinque Terre

The view everyone photographs is almost entirely man-made. To farm a cliff, people here stacked dry-stone terrace walls by hand, no mortar, for close to a thousand years. End to end they come to around 7,000 km of wall along just 14 km of coast, a quantity people like to set beside the Great Wall of China. When a terrace fails the hillside slides, so keeping these walls standing is the work behind the postcard.

The romantic idea is a fishing village; the truth is the opposite. These were farmers and winemakers. The founders came down from the hills of the Val di Vara around the 10th century, chasing vines and olives. The sea here was dangerous, not generous. You can still read it in the five sanctuaries standing above the villages, Soviore, Reggio, San Bernardino, Volastra, Montenero, which mark where people first settled, up high, before they dared the coast.

Long before tourism, these terraces made the villages rich. The white "Vernaccia" was prized across medieval Italy, and the sweet amber Sciacchetrà, pressed from grapes left to dry on racks for months, still is. Local lore even claims the Vernaccia Dante praised was theirs (San Gimignano would argue the point). Order a small glass after dinner and you’re drinking the reason these villages exist.

For centuries the sea brought raiders, not tourists: Saracen corsairs, then Turkish and Berber fleets. Under the Republic of Genoa, which gave "Cinque Terre" its name, the villages answered with watchtowers and a castle or two; Vernazza’s round Doria tower still stands over the harbor. The houses stacked tight against the rock aren’t only pretty. They were defensive.

On 25 October 2011 a freak storm dropped months of rain in hours. The terraces couldn’t hold it, and a wall of mud and debris tore through Vernazza and Monterosso, burying the main streets meters deep and killing nine people. What’s remarkable is the recovery. The villages dug out and rebuilt within a couple of years. Look for the small height-marks on the walls; that’s how high the mud reached.

Monterosso raised a Nobel laureate. The poet Eugenio Montale spent his boyhood summers here, and this coast runs all through his Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones): the lemons, the terraces, the glare off the sea. Italy’s schoolchildren still read him; few realize the landscape is a place you can walk into.

The coast is protected twice over: a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, a national park, and one of Italy’s first marine protected areas offshore. In practice that means no coastal road and barely a car: you arrive by train through tunnels in the cliffs, or by boat. The little Cinque Terre Express, hopping village to village in minutes, is the closest thing the park has to a main street.